> I hope some experienced people in the industry can give some hope and advice. Is demoralizing to find out I spent 4 years in school just to get into a really harsh job market. First pandemic, then recession? F...
Overall, I'd say relax a bit. You're still in a good situation. Recessions are hard for many, but software engineers were among the best off during the last one and I expect will be this time also.
> I wanna know if during recessions recruiting slows down even for big profitable companies.
I remember Google's recruiting slowed down in ~2008. [edit: 2009? Maybe not right at the start of the recession.] [1] So sometimes yes. On the bright side, it's rare for profitable large tech companies to lay off software engineers, so if you get in, you're pretty safe.
Even at startups, I don't expect a universal freeze. I asked an external recruiter (that is, someone who recruits for a variety of startups) a couple days ago about the present situation. She told me some companies she works with have done hiring freezes, others are still desperate to hire. There are opportunities. I'm not a good enough business person to give you solid general advice about which startups will be most resilient, though.
If you are good enough and/or persistent enough, my feeling is there will be a place for you in tech. (Even if, for example, you freeze up during coding interviews. Some companies do these, others don't. There's enough variety that you can still be okay if you don't have your sights set on a particular company.)
If you are not, there's almost certainly still a place for you as a software engineer in a stable, non-tech company or government position. Non-tech typically isn't as lucrative, but you can be comfortable. My feeling is many of these places have a tremendous need for just basic automation. Arguably more so during a recession, although they may not all realize this.
I started my career not long before the last recession. I didn't have any real existing savings to lose. Then I was earning far in excess of my needs and investing much of the rest in index funds (e.g. VTI) when stock prices were low. The recession ended and stock prices soared. I feel scummy saying this about many people's suffering, but the recession worked out well for me.
[1] Personally I think this was a mistake. They could have hired a lot of great people during this time. "Be bold when others are fearful." They had solid financial footing for hiring, and if nothing else, they could have put a fair number of folks on efficiency projects that would have more than paid their way in machine costs.
> Overall, I'd say relax a bit. You're still in a good situation. Recessions are hard for many, but software engineers were among the best off during the last one and I expect will be this time also.
The demand for software engineers was driven partly by zombie app and saas companies all competing for "top talent", dependent entirely on free cash but without sustainable business models.
On top of that, the "demand" narrative led to an influx of new software engineers that will mature over the next 1-3 years.
These two factors I believe put our industry at risk if there's a recession.
At risk? We’ll just stop having overinflated salaries. The current situation is insane for employers:
- Employees are not willing to put a little extra (paid extra, I mean - and we’re at the 35hrs week here),
- Not willing to study afterwork to improve their career,
- Not willing to work on legacy products where we pay them 40% more.
- In the first 2 years, I can pay someone 35 -> 50 -> +10k bonus, and they’ll leave for a job at 65 going 75 with a tech stack that ticks all boxes.
- You can teach them React + SpringBoot + Kubernetes, and they’ll still leave because company XYZ does AWS + Neo4j + AI… while still not fixing spelling mistakes in the UI and still in the habit of downloading and entire DB tables and filter them in the Java side, and seeing no problem asking for a microservices architecture.
This developer market is batshit crazy and isn’t tight enough to make people want to serve the needs of customers. “Do something hard and get a house in exchange” isn’t a persuasive argument today, they’ll get rich anyway. Instead, they serve their resume, which I perfectly respect and understand, it needs to be done too, but at one point, it’s a disconnect between customers, employers and developers.
Where are you located that you have a 35h week while enjoying such great benefits like employer investing in your training?
I'd like to move there.
In my EU country the working hours are 38.5 which isn't as good as 35h, but it isn't that bad, but no employer hires you to invest in your training. Every company wants only seniors, preferably for junior wages, and scream there's a shortage while offering no WFH because "management doesn't believe in WFH" and "the culture of working in the office is better".
I'm in UK, working at a video games studio and while we work 37.5h a week indeed all training is done during work hours, we hire people from junior and bring them up to senior/expert levels, with our average seniority being something stupid like 12 years+(longest one atm is 29 years). And yes, we only have to be in the office 1 day a week, personally I work 4 days from home 1 from the office, but it's up to everyone how they want to do it.
I am also interested in the geography here, especially wrt to the currency/units in "35 -> 50 -> +10k"
Are those numbers maybe denominated in Kuwaiti or Bahraini dinars? Or in some country-specific unspoken convenience unit such as tens-of-thousands of Japanese yen, or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Dong, or something like that?
Home time is personal time. Here I deal with family, chores and self-connection. If you want me to learn stuff and be better and my job you will have to give me time, company time, for that. We are not machine.
In France it is mandatory for the company to give time for training. Thanks unions.
Counterpoint: if you want to stay relevant in technology and be above regular level, you gotta have the passion for it and that implies doing your homework.
Look at it from another perspective. If you want to play a guitar in a band for money, you don’t require the band to give you “time to learn”. You learn on your own time.
If you don’t want to learn, you become irrelevant and get replaced.
You think doctors/nurses do homework? They go to paid courses/conferences all the time to stay up-to-date on the latest medical techniques. Hospitals have entire teaching departments for that kinda stuff. Why should it be different for engineers?
My late father was a physician and he absolutely stayed up late doing homework. He'd study for hours before an usual case.
I remember as a kid helping him swap out the latest updates to these massive binders of the latest and greatest info in medicine, which were expensive subscriptions he paid for. They'd send sections of text and instructions on what pages to remove and replace with the update so you'd always have the most current information.
Now we have web-based solutions that do the same thing, and they're often not free, either.
- I like [thing I do at my job] and I don't mind doing it outside of working hours. An incidental side benefit of this is I learn skills that enhance my career.
- A company I work for or am interviewing at is unhappy I don't like doing [thing I do there] outside of working hours, and either will fire me or not hire me unless I change.
The difference is "do companies use this as a metric", and I think it's pretty clear they shouldn't. If they do, they run into all kinds of other biases, mostly that you select out people who have family obligations (you're a parent, your partner also works, you have a sick family member, etc.).
Further, it creates a race to the bottom dynamic where a super important part of your life--your career--asks more and more from the other parts of your life. You shouldn't be able to get ahead of other people in your career by telling your kid to figure out algebra on their own, and if you can, people who advance in their careers (who will have more power in the workplace and thus society) will be the kinds of people who either had the resources to otherwise meet their other obligations (hire a tutor, nurse, etc.), or the kinds of people who didn't care about shirking them.
That's why maintaining this line is so important. It avoids an incentive structure that would empower the already privileged or the irresponsible.
How is that related? That can already happen if a company decide to have this approach. See also companies that have PIP targets.
Presumably companies have a good idea of employees' skill sets when they hire them, or they terminate the contract by the end of the probation period, so they can also plan for this necessary learning.
It’s related in the sense that if your set of skills becomes irrelevant, you get replaced. Want to keep your job then learn the things reqiured to keep your job.
Say you’re a truck driver. You have your license to drive a truck and every year you need to do your vision test to keep your license. If one day you have to buy glasses, well, tough luck - they come out of your pocket. Otherwise you can’t drive and your employer cannot put you on a truck.
Of course there are always people who are trying to one-up or push ahead up the career-advancement ladder... but I've never ever seen a better candidate appear and challenge someone's position directly. If someone started a new job and starting calling someone out for not doing their job as well, they'd be fired pretty quickly. That's just outright hostile behavior.
Granted I've always worked outside of the valley, I guess FAANG positions can be more hostile.
What's wrong with those two? I'm genuinely interested, software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about and you're upset about not being able to put extra 5 hours of time a week to improve your skills related to something that's your career?
And we wonder why quality of everything is awful and why people are unreliable and entitled.
> software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about
Then why do companies keep on paying these salaries? Besides, that doesn’t really apply outside of unicorns and SV. I’ve been doing this for a while and have never had catered lunches or dry cleaning etc provided by my employers.
Also, what are you comparing to? Professional athletes or traders are overpaid compared to SE. if you compare to burger flippers then it doesn’t make sense either.
Accountants are paid quite well for instance. Their employers pay for their time and expenses when they go to a seminar and keep their skills up to date. Why should it be any different for SE?
You’re missing the point. It’s that companies shouldn’t expect employees to improve themselves for the companies benefit on their own time. Not that employees shouldn’t improve themselves for their own benefit on their own time if they want to. Ergo if companies expect employees to work specifically to get better at their jobs they should provide resources and training in work time as its part of the job itself.
well after education usually salary can be upgraded, so it’s a benefit for employee. if employee does not educate himself, he may stay the same level with no salary bumps. sucks for both parties I guess?
> This attitude where employees sit like bags of potatoes waiting for knowledge to permeate their brains via osmosis is awful.
I think you misunderstand. A person who is getting paid is already useful. That is why they were hired. By studying you want them to be more useful and that is an extra demand over their contract.
But if things changes and you no longer need their services then should you just fire them? Telling the employee that they can keep their job if they update their skills is a nice thing to do, it is much better than just firing them without giving them a chance.
If you no longer need the services that you initially contracted for, then you fire them since there is nothing left for them to do. How is that so hard to understand? There is nothing saying that you need to keep people around when you no longer have any need of their services, not even any moral reasons.
You're paying your employee because they are suitable at this moment. Expecting someone to study in their free time is nonsense. If you want that you either need to pay for it or allow study time during the work time.
I want to provide service to clients that we're paid for. I want staff to actually know what they claim they know. I want to deliver so we can all get paid and go home and do whatever else interests us.
That's what I want.
But I'm the proxy between staff, clients and government. So when I stay up late every night in order to reconcile all the warring parties, the comment I get is "pay more if you want to get more".
Or I could not deal with entitled underskilled staff, right? That's also a viable option? Why beg people to sharpen their craft if they don't want to? I might be old fashioned and I might take pride in what I do because I want to do it to the best of my abilities. I might have wrongly assumed that the rest of fellow programmers are similar to that, but it seems not.
I doubt highly skilled modern workers would want to work for someone with the attitude expressed. Those people have options and working for a company that has a one-sided old-fashioned attitude that refuses to train them for the companies chosen development stack would be foolish.
This reads as "My work-life balance sucks, but rather than fight for improvement, I'm going to complain about how others have it so good."
You sound like you live to work rather than work to live. It's a sad way to live your life. Years from now, you'll be on your death bed wishing you allowed yourself to relax a bit and have more fun.
exactly, you are paying for current skills. If employer is fine with current skills, and employee wants a better salary, which would require new skills, who should make effort?
>software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about
Maybe in some parts of America. Even highly paid developers generally do work that not many people outside of the industry can't do (though I encourage everyone I know to try programming).
In my mind software developers and other tech workers are one of the driving forces of human development, though not quite so much as those working on the forefront of technology (ie proper engineering/research and development). The industry I hold in the highest regard is the medical industry; doctors are just amazing and I appreciate what they do and their importance (fair warning that this is a non-American/public healthcare perspective).
I think a lot of HN devs, even in Europe, live in a high earners bubble, especially if they have seniority at a good company in a hot market, and loose perspective of what the average wages really are.
That apples to oranges comparison is hardly relevant in this context.
For better or worse, Europe has much less income inequality than in the US, so European dev wages are a lot closer to the median wages, than in the US where devs make several times over the national median wage.
If you remove the big tech hubs like London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. then median European dev wages plummet, coming to party with the rest of the white collar jobs.
Acting like companies deserve underpaid labor (let's not even get into the combination of that with an expectation of fealty + coming to the office every day to avoid managers being lonely) gets us to situations where people out of college with shitty negotiation skills end up losing 5 years of their life in miserable situations.
Unless you are a business owner, having everyone be paid reasonably is a net win, but it's also the right thing to do, and shows a minimum of respect to people doing work.
If you can’t pay competitively for competent people, then complain that nobody wants to work for you, I think the real problem is that your business is unviable since you can’t cover the costs to operate it
Those are 20% above market rate in France, probably 40% above when you don’t have an engineer’s degree.
The blanket “YOU PAY THEM TOO LITTLE” and its brother “EVEN AT THE BEGINNING OF MY CAREER I NEVER STUDY AT HOME AND I JUST DO WHAT MY EMPLOYER TELLS ME ON A WRITTEN SHEET OF PAPER WITH DEFINITIVE SIGN OFF” mentality needs to go.
You choose:
- Want to work in a factory? €1200 net per month,
- Job that requires that you come with a skillset? €2400 pm.
- Job where you build an unknown product with lots of leeway, innovation, networking and entrepreneurship? 5400€ to 20k€ per month. 20k€ is President Macron’s salary, so it’s not so low.
I’ll give my 200k€ dividends to whoever accepts to perform the odd tasks like maintain the jQuery app AND clean the bathrooms AND notice when they need cleaning AND launch a new product when it needs launching AND close one down and find suitable ways out for customers.
“How do you expect them to work for you if you make them clean the toilets!” well that’s why I’m getting the bonus. To anyone willing to bend for the toilets when needed, there is a job available here.
Don't read what's written the way it suits you in order to come out as a better person, also commenting on someone's business with literally 0 facts means only that you're posting from an image you created in which you're good and me - evil.
Competent people are worth every penny and then some. We're all talking about incompetent ones who throw a huge shadow over the competent ones.
I think you're aware of that but you still posted what you posted. Thank you for the compassion and understanding. Guilty before trial, that's the way we do it, right? :)
I don't think this is true... I've worked with excellent engineers and aside from a couple at the very, very beginning of their career (~2009/2010 no less when the economy was terrible) they were very well paid.
Those wages are atrocious. Perhaps you do not have a viable business model.
Keep in mind that your competition is not just France. Plenty of people (myself included) took note of the terrible wages in Europe and decided that maybe those American companies with 6 figure remote jobs aren't so bad after all.
Lol from this post I can tell you're an employer that nobody will ever want to work for no matter the salary you're paying. The economic situation and developers are not the issue, you are.
My student loan payments will probably be around $1200 a month after I graduate and a studio apartment in my pretty small city is $900 without utilities. I could probably survive on a $35k salary but I'd have to switch to income based repayment on my loans which would suck because I'd like to eventually be able to buy a house
That's one of the big differences: the only thing a normal person in France, Germany or the rest of western Europe* could do that involves a 1200/month repayment is buy property (or an absolutely ridiculous car). A lot of the younger employees I work with got paid while doing their bachelor's degrees because they did dual degree programs, where they're employed by a big industrial company and alternate terms having internships within the company and taking courses at the university the company partners with.
* I say "western Europe" because I know that university fees in the UK are higher, and this is the region I currently know enough to say this about, but I imagine university fees are similarly low in eastern and southern Europe.
The only way you'd be paying back £1200 a month on student loans (plan 2) in the UK is if you were earning £180,180/year or more. And at that income, it's probably not the student loans giving you trouble.
One might also bring up the fact that people in "outsourcing" countries also don't have such nice WLB.
> Not willing to study afterwork to improve their career,
Most of the stuff i've learnt (Docker/OCI, Swarm/Kubernetes/Nomad, CI/CD concepts, monitoring, different architectures and new languages) all were in my free time, because the tech stacks at work were somewhat dated and would pigeonhole me into maintenance roles and similar enterprise messes.
Then again, one can and should make the point: doctors don't practice their craft over the weekends, why should software engineers? Do cashiers have to do unpaid work after hours? Do teachers? And if yes, is that okay? Shouldn't your work be compensated, instead of cutting into your free time?
> Not willing to work on legacy products where we pay them 40% more.
Currently the oldest project that I'm working on is like 8 years old and it's a mess. Recently tried modernizing it, would recommend that NOBODY ever try to do that, since I learnt almost no new skills at the expense of massive amounts of stress and struggling with problem after problem, just to keep this old monolith alive.
40% might seem nice at a glance, but what about the alternative costs of not learning new and relevant technologies and thus getting passed up for new work opportunities? What about suffering daily due to needing to waste your time with some dated mess, since most old code is unwieldy to work with at best and horrible at worst?
> In the first 2 years, I can pay someone 35 -> 50 -> +10k bonus, and they’ll leave for a job at 65 going 75 with a tech stack that ticks all boxes.
That is largely how the industry is and I doubt that I can blame people for wanting to maximize their own earning potential, especially in the current financial climate.
Of course, once again this doesn't really match up with my own circumstances, given that owning a home might take about 10 more years of saving money for me, given that I'm not as well paid as all these other developers.
> You can teach them React + SpringBoot + Kubernetes, and they’ll still leave because company XYZ does AWS + Neo4j + AI… while still not fixing spelling mistakes in the UI and still in the habit of downloading and entire DB tables and filter them in the Java side, and seeing no problem asking for a microservices architecture.
With this, I can mostly agree. If things like spelling don't matter to people, obviously they aren't going to pay attention to them.
But overall, I still find your points to be too focused on a particular environment. Developers everywhere doesn't have it quite as good to begin with, no matter how much of an echo chamber HN can sometimes be.
Then again, last i checked, a Google employee would bring in around ~20x more profits for their company than I would (with some oversimplified back-of-the-napkin maths): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
There are risks, yes, but fundamentally we are still an industry that has a lot of upside, vs many others. In a recession many businesses will contract, but it's a rare large tech company that will do more than pause some forms of spending. Even when you hear that hiring is paused at the big tech companies, they will usually still be backfilling departures, and they won't be doing significant layoffs. The exceptions are companies with large service-based businesses that may or not qualify as tech companies based on your definition.
I work at one of those two ad-supported businesses, and would be very surprised if there are large scale layoffs.
And yes, as one of the responders noted, I meant the services companies. An IBM might do a large layoff, but I generally wouldn't put that in the same category as Amazon or Netflix. I've worked through three economic cycles now (at least I think we're seeing the end of the third) and while they haven't been great for everyone in the industry, we've been better off than most others. For instance, just to pick on one profession, I know way more lawyers who've become software engineers than vice versa.
I think they were referring to companies like Accenture, IBM, or PwC. The "Professional Services" industry employs a ton of software developers and is fairly pro-cyclical.
>The demand for software engineers was driven partly by zombie app and saas companies all competing for "top talent", dependent entirely on free cash but without sustainable business models.
Now that the cash is drying up, Startups which didn't solve any real problem couldn't bruteforce their growth anymore. Perhaps this is good for the entire ecosystem.
Software will be fine for people who are in an unknown top X% of developers out there. Depending on how bad this is that might be the top 80%, it might be the top 1%.
The industry is so crazy now because of the last recession. Investors didn't know where to put their money after the real estate collapse and they decided to pour it all into funding startups hoping, at all costs, to catch the next Facebook.
We're starting to see that maybe even Facebook isn't really the next Facebook.
Additionally we never really solved the root of the last crisis: exploding credit/debt.
It's impossible to know how this will all really play out this time (who would have guessed that the pandemic would be immediately followed by a stock boom). However my advice would be to focus on adaptability. Don't chase a dead dream too long. If tech never comes back to the insane period we're in now, I think there will be a lot of former developers that suffer a long time before they realize this.
Most people in 2010 would’ve taken a $500B or even $300B market cap FB as a major tech company right now without any expectation of getting too much bigger than that ever. $300B, $400B, $500B are still top 25, 15, and 10 in the world today.
But would’ve they predicted the that value of those 300B US dollars would be worth so much less?
Many tech companies during COVID gained legitimate value, just like many housing markets, but most the increase in their US dollar price was simply the value of the dollar being less.
> But would’ve they predicted the that value of those 300B US dollars would be worth so much less?
I hope so. It has been the consistent course of action of the federal US government for many, many decades to provide a backstop for broad market asset prices at the expense of the purchasing power of the dollar.
All parties in positions of power benefit from increase in asset prices. The politicians, the business owners, the land owners, the 401K owners, the taxpayers (via defined benefit pension tax liabilities).
I’d think so. Whether they realize it or not. Since inflation for the US isn’t a crazy situation without precedent. 2021, 2022 have been a lot more for inflation, but this century has overall been something that is not unexpected.
Looking at how big FB is vs other companies makes a metric like inflation not as important as all companies and thus all investments are affected by inflation.
So, still, any of the example market caps for FB today would’ve been gladly accepted by almost every one in 2010, regardless of the specific percentage of inflation that has happened. FB would still be a top 25 company in market cap at $300B. Top 20 if looking at US only.
>but most the increase in their US dollar price was simply the value of the dollar being less
And in general, the value of a currency is less because there are more money being invented out from thin air. By central banks printing money, through the fractional reserve system, crypto and stable coins...
Ahh, maybe you're right for other big tech companies. It was rare at Google. The only cases I remember involved "remote offices" (i.e. not Mountain View). In a couple cases, they closed whole offices (Atlanta) and folks had to relocate or leave. Similarly, sometimes offices gave up whole projects ("defragging"), so folks had to find a new project or leave.
(btw, it would have been easier to meet diversity goals if they'd kept the Atlanta office open, but that's a whole other thread.)
I've been in the industry for 27 years now. People who entered the tech job market after 2015 are in for a rude awakening IMO. Especially those whose experience is primarily FAANG-MULA and similar. This market very much reminds me of 1997-2000 and 2001-2003 was UGLY.
You just have to ask. "Was the business plan was to keep getting VC money or crypto money for the next 5 years before being profitable." If the answer is yes, you should expect huge layoffs or bankruptcy in most cases.
I managed to work as a contractor during 2003, after that the market became better. I guess that's the tendency - employment opportunities are going to be kind of short lived.
If you didn't manage to get into a job that is business critical, then I wouldn't count on a steady job. they like to get rid of the workforce in layoff rounds. For me that was very depressing, in the end i was laid off in another of these layoff rounds.
But still there is demand for getting stuff done, and places will be more inclined to hire people specifically for a set of tasks, on a contract basis.
I still hope it is not going to get that bad; I didn't have a wife and three kids to feed back then, also I was some twenty years younger. In any event: my advice would be to keep your savings and refrain from taking up any new loans...
I remember Google's recruiting slowed down in ~2008. [edit: 2009? Maybe not right at the start of the recession.] [1] So sometimes yes. On the bright side, it's rare for profitable large tech companies to lay off software engineers, so if you get in, you're pretty safe.
I don't think Google has seen the impact of a recession yet. It was 4 years old in the dot.com era, and insulated from the effects of the recession by a steady stream of VC money. It was 11 years old in 2008, 5 years out of its IPO, and growing insanely fast on the back of an internet boom where every business was struggling to understand how to utilize online advertising to get the best possible results. Businesses believed that online ads would protect them from the 2008 collapse, so Google were in a position to grow despite the downturn.
The same is not true now. If there's a serious long term recession it's very likely to impact companies with advertising derived revenue far more than it has in the past. In Google's case it'll probably mean little more than repatriating the cash reserves it has offshore and spending them to weather the storm. We all know that some of the higher ups will want to use it as an excuse to 'trim some fat' because that's what higher ups do though. No one will be safe.
The same is probably not true of other companies that are less cash-rich though. There's no reason to assume that tech will be fine this time because tech was fine last time.
> It was 4 years old in the dot.com era, and insulated from the effects of the recession by a steady stream of VC money
Google received its last funding round 1999, after that they were profitable every single year. Modern start-ups aren't anything like Google back then. Google survived the dotcom bust since they made money, if they depended on VC funding they would have gone bust then as well.
> Then I was earning far in excess of my needs and investing much of the rest in index funds (e.g. VTI) when stock prices were low. The recession ended and stock prices soared. I feel scummy saying this about many people's suffering, but the recession worked out well for me.
Don't feel too bad about it. You were using what resources you had to give yourself a more stable future. If you still feel bad, use the more-stable future you've made to help others in some way.
Anyone with the money to invest and a long-term view can invest in a dip and come out strong. Buy when there's blood in the streets, etc. I doubled an investment's value (XOP, an oil index) because I bought when oil was in crisis a few years back, and sold for nearly 2x when the war in Ukraine kicked prices up. Technically war profiteering, but it's not like I planned it that way.
If a recession comes during a student loan pause, I'll be putting that would-be loan payment into the market if I don't need it to survive. If my car is paid off by then, even better, as I'll have more available funds to contribute to my portfolio.
At the time, it's very hard for Google to predict how bad things could be. Ads business tends to get hit very hard when the overall market is in a bad shape, no matter how great the search engine is.
Google was profitable and dominant by 2009. I wouldn’t go near a startup that wasn’t profitable and hoping for another round of funding in this environment if I had any alternative.
Overall, I'd say relax a bit. You're still in a good situation. Recessions are hard for many, but software engineers were among the best off during the last one and I expect will be this time also.
> I wanna know if during recessions recruiting slows down even for big profitable companies.
I remember Google's recruiting slowed down in ~2008. [edit: 2009? Maybe not right at the start of the recession.] [1] So sometimes yes. On the bright side, it's rare for profitable large tech companies to lay off software engineers, so if you get in, you're pretty safe.
Even at startups, I don't expect a universal freeze. I asked an external recruiter (that is, someone who recruits for a variety of startups) a couple days ago about the present situation. She told me some companies she works with have done hiring freezes, others are still desperate to hire. There are opportunities. I'm not a good enough business person to give you solid general advice about which startups will be most resilient, though.
If you are good enough and/or persistent enough, my feeling is there will be a place for you in tech. (Even if, for example, you freeze up during coding interviews. Some companies do these, others don't. There's enough variety that you can still be okay if you don't have your sights set on a particular company.)
If you are not, there's almost certainly still a place for you as a software engineer in a stable, non-tech company or government position. Non-tech typically isn't as lucrative, but you can be comfortable. My feeling is many of these places have a tremendous need for just basic automation. Arguably more so during a recession, although they may not all realize this.
I started my career not long before the last recession. I didn't have any real existing savings to lose. Then I was earning far in excess of my needs and investing much of the rest in index funds (e.g. VTI) when stock prices were low. The recession ended and stock prices soared. I feel scummy saying this about many people's suffering, but the recession worked out well for me.
[1] Personally I think this was a mistake. They could have hired a lot of great people during this time. "Be bold when others are fearful." They had solid financial footing for hiring, and if nothing else, they could have put a fair number of folks on efficiency projects that would have more than paid their way in machine costs.